In their daily activities, teachers carry out a variety of duties and tasks including classroom teaching, curriculum programming and planning, production of teaching resources, production of assessment instruments, marking and recording assessment results, and recording attendance and details of student behavior and other care issues. School staff, employees, and security officers often assist teachers in detailing and monitoring student behavior in class, on school grounds, at bus stops, and on busses to and from school. Teachers, staff, and security officers often need additional assistance monitoring student behavior and watching for unauthorized people on school grounds. Students, parents, care givers, and community members often provide the additional assistance in monitoring and reporting inappropriate student behavior or unauthorized people on school grounds.
Due to bullying, peer pressure, and other factors, students are often hesitant to report inappropriate student behavior where other students within the school or within their peer groups are likely to discover the reporting. Anonymity of reporting is often important to a student in deciding to report inappropriate behavior in the school setting, so that the student may avoid peer pressure or bullying as a response to reporting an incident. When students leave the scene of an incident of inappropriate behavior, such as bullying, to report the behavior to school staff, the incident has often moved or been resolved by the time staff arrives to respond to the report. Anti-bullying applications for mobile devices have been created in an attempt to aid in limiting bullying and reporting inappropriate behavior, as well as quicken staff response time. Some anti-bullying applications allow video recording and uploading of incidents in real or near real time, entering a text or hotline telephone number to a list of contacts, sending an email to a person or contact telling them of the incident, and audio recording incidents followed by emailing the recordings to a list of contacts. Some of the anti-bullying applications incorporate global positioning system (GPS) tracking to enable use of location data with the application.
In reporting inappropriate behavior, time is of the essence. These applications often require texting or typing of pertinent information into an email or text screen, in a free typing format, as would be experienced by a user sending a text or email message. Long form texting or typing requires the user reporting a bullying or other inappropriate behavioral incident to determine a type of incident, describe the information, determine the location, describe the location, and then cause the application to send the report to one or more people on a contact list. In addition to time delays for reporting, these applications do little to provide anonymity to students reporting an incident. Further, the person or persons notified of the incident are usually on a static list, receiving notifications of incidents regardless of the type of incident the application is used to report.
There is a need for a system, application, and program which better enables anonymity in reporting incidents of inappropriate behavior, speeds the reporting of the incident, reduces the possible number of errors from a free typing format, and tailors the reporting notification to enable appropriate responses to incidents of varying types from responders with appropriate skill sets.